The Scare Salon

As usual in my film discussions, I will not be spoiling the whole movie, but I may be talking about some plot points that you might not want to know ahead of time, so reader beware from this point forward.

In the cold open, we’re presented with an older man (Peter Mullan, who’s been in a million things but who I always remember from the excellent Session 9 from 2001) named Owen Lark, who is turning away a young man whose name, we later learn, is Neil (Jeremy Irvine). Neil is clearly distraught, begging Owen to “let me see my wife,” but Owen refuses for reasons we can’t immediately discern.

We then see Owen making a videotape for someone, utilizing the common trope of, “If you’re watching this, I’m already dead.” He says he’s going to try to end it, but if he can’t, he’s failed and the whole thing is the watcher’s problem now. Owen then tries to burn down the pub, starting in the basement, where it’s revealed he’s keeping someone (or something). Long story short, Owen ends up burning to death, collapsing in the hallway of his own establishment.

We then cut to a young woman named Iris (Freya Allan), who is in the process of breaking back into an apartment that she was just evicted from in order to get her stuff. With this brief introduction, we already know that Iris is having some money problems and that this might not be the first time she’s had to deal with this shit. Her best friend Katie (Ruby Barker) has come along to help, and it’s also efficiently implied that Katie has a long history of bailing Iris out of financial scrapes. It’s not so much that Iris is a fuck-up or lazy; she mostly just seems to have had a lot of bad luck and family trauma to boot.

As the two young women are leaving the scene, Iris gets an unexpected phone call. The caller informs her that her father has died; this comes as a surprise to Katie, who believed Iris’s dad was dead already. Turns out Iris’s father took off and left her and her mother Catherine (Saffron Burrows), who also subsequently died, and Iris and her dad became estranged. She later tells Katie she hadn’t seen him for years and didn’t even know where he lived.

As you might have guessed, Iris’s dad was Owen, and Iris has inherited his pub, The Queen’s Head. She goes to see the solicitor in charge of her dad’s estate (played by Ned Dennehy), who naturally assumes that Iris will probably want to sell the decrepit old place in order to clear her father’s debts. Iris has a look at the gigantic pile, though, and because she’s essentially homeless, she asks if she can crash there for the night while she figures out what to do. The solicitor seems taken aback, but it does belong to her now, so he relents.

Later on that night, Iris notices a weird locked door at the end of a corridor that has a bunch of what look like runes carved on it, and even later than that, she’s startled by the appearance of the young man from the beginning, who apparently heard that the old owner died and is now back to make his strange request to the new one.

Iris is understandably terrified of this dude, who simply wandered into the building in the middle of the night, but he insists he’s no danger. He then offers her the princely sum of £2000 to go down to the basement to see his wife. She has no idea what he’s talking about, but he seems very sincere, even doubling the amount when she hesitates. She finally agrees to whatever it is that he wants, but she tells him she doesn’t have the keys to the basement door yet, so he will have to come back the following night.

In the meanwhile, a worried Katie has flown out to wherever this pub is to give Iris moral support, but before she arrives, Iris returns to the solicitor’s office and tells him she’s decided to take over the pub herself. She is asked to sign an ancient-looking piece of parchment with a pen that has the same runes as the basement door carved into it (uh oh), and voilà, the place is hers.

Katie thinks she’s crazy for taking the place on, and questions the wisdom of taking money from this Neil guy, who is probably a nut. Iris argues that she’s been poor and struggling her whole life, and maybe now she has an opportunity to have something for herself, a different life where she’ll be able to afford to set up an art studio like she always wanted. What does she really have to lose, after all?

When Neil returns, both Iris and Katie accompany him down to the basement, which is enormous and has a ragged hole in the brick toward the back of the space. There’s also an odd, throne-looking chair in the middle of the room with straps on the arms, and a regular chair sitting across from it.

Neil, who seems to know what to do, starts calling out to someone. At first, nothing happens, and Iris and Katie exchange significant glances, but then, to their utter shock, a woman with a burlap sack over her head comes shuffling out of the hole.

This woman is obviously Baghead, and she has a very special power. You see, if you give her something belonging to a dead loved one, she will ingest the object and then actually summon and transform into your dead loved one, so you can talk to them for one last time.

There are rules and best practices, though, which Iris discovers after she watches her father’s videotape. One: It’s really only wise to speak with your dear departed for two minutes, because after that, Baghead starts taking back over and gets a mite surly. Two: Whoever’s name is on the deed of the pub is the only person who can tell Baghead what to do, but only up to a point. Three: No one should never go into the hole in the wall where Baghead emerges from. Four: The more often people use Baghead’s powers, the stronger she gets. And five: Baghead must never, EVER be allowed to leave the basement.

As you might imagine, pretty much all of these rules get bent or broken along the way, as Iris is tempted by Neil’s offers of money for access to Baghead and becomes more and more intertwined with Baghead’s power to speak with the dead.

As I mentioned, this was a fairly solid watch; not great, but not bad either. The interiors of the pub were nice and creepy, the monster had an interesting look and back story, and the end went in a direction I admit I didn’t expect. The acting was good pretty much across the board, with Peter Mullan and Freya Allan both being excellent; but I thought a few of the minor roles were a little overwrought. There was also a sort of clunky expositional sequence where one character gave the history of Baghead that probably could have been done a bit more elegantly.

If you liked Talk To Me and want to see something along those lines, then this might fit the bill nicely. It’s quite a serious film, with no humor in it whatsoever, which didn’t bother me at all but might not appeal to some people. The CGI was also slightly ropey in places, but this is an independent, low-budget affair, and they were fine in that context, so I couldn’t be too mad.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.